In the dim and distant past when keyboards were enclosed in metal cases and you certainly didn’t tuck one under the arm and walk around with it (actually I don’t do now either), the placement of many keys was continually up for debate. But apart from the main QWERTY section, one of the key placements you could rely on was the Control key next to the “A” key. These days it’s been turned into one of those silly CapsLock keys.
Back when I previously did some keymapping, I neglected to mention how I mapped CapsLock into a Control key. As appropriate punishment, changing window managers has somehow meant that my previous mapping had been lost. So I had to figure out how to do it again.
First thing to do is to switch to a text console – I’ll be mapping this at a very low level.
Next thing to do is to find out the scancode of the key I want to map :-
# showkey -s
One started I have to press the key I am interested in within 10 seconds or the program will edit. I press CapsLock and I get two numbers displayed – 3a and ba (they’re in hexadecimal for the base-16 challenged). The first is the key press, and the second is the key release. We can discard the second as Linux is clever enough to figure out one from the other.
The next thing we want to do is to obtain the keycode of the key that we want to map to – in this case the left control key. It probably doesn’t matter here, but it is worth noting that the left and right control keys are different scancodes and keycodes. So you could map then to different things. Anyway, to obtain the keycode of the key we want, run :-
# showkey -k
And press the key to map to.
Lastly we want to construct the command to actually do the mapping :-
setkeycodes 3a 29
This of course has to be added to a script being run when the system boots – you want this mapped as early as possible.